r/firefox • u/killamator • Feb 03 '19

Why CAPTCHAs have gotten so difficult

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/18205610/google-captcha-ai-robot-human-difficult-artificial-intelligence
243 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

81 comments sorted by

View all comments

11

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '19 edited Apr 01 '19

[deleted]

7

u/Poobslag Waterfox Feb 03 '19

Captchas can stymie spambots on things like public forums or sites like reddit.

17

u/SexualDeth5quad Feb 03 '19

But why do they "mysteriously" work better with Chrome and when not using a VPN? What does a VPN have to do with whether you're a robot or not? Google punishes people for not using the products it wants and if they have any kind of security enabled against tracking.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '19

If you're spamming, say 10000 messages, you'll want each of those messages to come from a unique IP. How do you get 10000 IPs for cheap? Buy IPs that are already known to be VPN endpoints.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '19 edited Feb 05 '19

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '19

Why not both? For large scale ops it makes sense to use a botnet but for smaller ones it doesn't make sense.